“And I throw my cellular device in the water. Can you reach me? No, you can’t,” Lorde joked on the title track from her 2021 album, Solar Power. The New Zealand singer’s mid-pandemic album centered on a kind of New Age–y rebirth, one that involved logging off. She told the New York Times she was afraid of her screen time. She told NPR she was “divorced” from the idea of a feed. Part of what keeps the pop star so appealing is her willingness to disappear (horror of horrors: stop posting) in between album cycles.
There have been a handful of surprises to go with the announcement of Lorde’s fourth album, Virgin, from her “expanding” gender identity to her artistic separation from Jack Antonoff, but one of the biggest is that she’s done a bit of an about face on all her gadgets. In a Rolling Stone video, the singer showed off a number of her artifacts, including her headphones, iPhone, and laptop. “I somewhat famously had a real stance in my last album about refusal and rejection around the ‘device,’” she says with a smirk. While Lorde might have a newfound appreciation for her personal tech, that doesn’t mean it survived the last album cycle unharmed. Her phone is smashed, in part because the singer believes these items can be thrown around a bit. “They can take it,” she promises, spoken like someone who never dropped their phone in a sink full of dishwater. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere relating to her new work, which she keeps ensuring will be raw and messy. Perhaps we’ve all been treating Lorde a bit too carefully — she can take the hurt and bounce back from it alive. She still manages to be very Lorde about having a phone, referring to it as “full of liquid crystals” that she “commands to summon up pictures.” One way to stave off the pessimism of techno-supremacy is to make it feel magical and witchy as opposed to oppressive and tedious. Even the cover of Virgin — the X-ray showing the singer’s IUD — feels like it’s coming to terms with the technological overload inherent to living in a body.
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Lorde isn’t the only pop girlie to be staking their claim on tech. Addison Rae’s latest single, “Headphones On,” speaks to the healing power of not having to listen to the world around her. Even in Iceland, Rae has her wired headphones in. “You can’t fix what has already been broken,” she sings, both about her parents’ marriage and presumably our cultural reliance on needing a phone to do everything for us. Doechii shouts out Instagram DMs and TikTok in “DENIAL IS A RIVER.” Charli XCX’s somewhat recently resurfaced “party 4 u” feels iconic in part due to its autotune — her sadness funneled through machines can’t hide the hurt in her voice.
What feels most exciting about Lorde’s turn is that it’s proven the artist can shift and morph without compromising her values. As pleased as she is about all her Apple products — hey, same — she spends a lot of the most recent Rolling Stone profile shouting out books, long walks, and ovulating. Lorde isn’t so keen to escape the world this time around, even if she might balk at what it values. She’s logged on, ready to embrace what’s next on the feed.
